


Familiarity, or; the Femmeiliad

by applegnat



Category: Greek/Roman Mythology
Genre: Multi, cross-dressing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-30
Updated: 2009-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-05 11:53:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/41485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/applegnat/pseuds/applegnat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Achilles really likes women.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Familiarity, or; the Femmeiliad

**Author's Note:**

> Written for **tehta**'s prompt: "How about Achilles!femmeslash about him and Deidamia? Back when he was disguised as a girl? Dated June 2005.

Everyone has a terrible secret and this was Achilles'. He liked being a woman.

So it was in a manner of speaking. Achilles was at the age when nothing and no one was good enough, and what could have been good enough was absent, distant, or unheard-of, and was, consequently, nothing and no one. Achilles was also at the age when proximity was everything. Take his sexual appetites. Proximity worked wonders for them.

He liked his sexual appetites too. They were fantastic entertainment. When you are a serving wench of Scyros – the only kingdom in the Aegean smaller and pokier than Phthia, _thanks_, Mother – life's little pleasures are limited.

Achilles counted himself lucky that the one pleasure accessible to him could not, by any stretch of reason, be called little.

Did this have everything or nothing to do with his liking for being a woman? One or the other cannot be decided upon for certain. Even Achilles was constructed of webs of subtle complexities (although most people would only remember this after his tragi-comic, heroi-villainous death). He liked the sense of self he achieved in the women's quarters; liked that beneath the skirts, the trinkets and the make-up, there was something immutable; a heartbeat, a soul whose outlines only seemed more vital, more solid, even, as he immersed himself deeper and deeper in this ridiculous charade, a desire that broadened and deepened every day in denial. To Achilles, that desire was _him_. The more he suppressed it, the more it grew, and the more he was Achilles.

And there was his body. It wasn't just his manhood, that possession which was, in the head cook's general terms, his sausage (a food that always elicited titters from the other girls). Every other day, all of him was growing taller and wider under the dresses the seamstresses (who were in on the secret from the start) kept letting out tirelessly . It was as though keeping his feelings bottled up were making his blouses burst at the seams and his ankles gangle scandalously beneath his hems. He was an adolescent, and beginning to look it now, albeit a bit suspiciously. After all, a girl growing as tall as he was ought to have developed a bit more in the mysterious area between the throat and stomach, where other girls were showing the beginnings of secret, beautiful things, all dips and curves and softnesses that made life, delicately speaking, hard for him. He wanted those, wanted to uncover and look at and touch them.

Wanted to – this was where the complex part came in – own them.

But Achilles, as we have said before, was at the age when nothing was good enough. That was why he was in disguise in Scyros, after all. Never mind his clever, slightly dotty mother's reasons, rooted in politics and destiny. He was here to wait out his years of not-good-enough, not-strong-enough, of not-fast-enough, of plain just-not-enough. And what better place for a boy to go, to wait and watch and not be good enough, but among women? If he was lanky, flame-haired and as flat as the plain of Athens, it was alright, wasn't it? It was certainly not as bad as meeting destiny at fourteen, not knowing whether you were capable of outrunning it.

Besides, he had plenty of good points to balance it out. The keen eye and nimble fingers that would one day be the toast of Agammemnon's armies stood him in good stead as he learnt and enjoyed crochet and handwork. He could thread three needles faster than most girls could do one. He could weave and spin well into lunchtime, when the other kids were panting and faint with hunger. No less than Chiron had drilled endurance into him, after all, and even the royal housekeeper of Scyros, formidable as she was, was little match for the wisest and best centaur of all. And no one envied or hated him for it. He was perfectly crap at cooking – no sense of smell worth speaking of – and that cheered them up a good deal. Besides, he was very jolly to sit next to when they were allowed to watch the boys fighting in the sandpit, for he was bound to get flustered, and then he would hop up and down, clutch his hair and try to give them orders. All in all, he was sweet and charming and knew the best ever dirty jokes; and if he was so beautiful that a lift of his lashes sometimes made a girl catch her breath, well, what did it matter? He had no breasts and had to fill his uniform with wads of cotton, everyone knew. They had all caught him at it, for try as he might, he never could wake up earlier than the rest of them.

* * *

One day, he was lumbering around the princess' quarters, picking up her dirty clothes for laundry. He had a boner the size of Mycenae from touching and holding all the exquisite bits of soft, lacy lingerie Deidameia left lying around, but the girls passing by thought his difficulty was thanks to the extra-thick wad of cloth they were all allowed on their heavy-flow days – no fancy _sanitary_ stuff for mere maids of all work, if you please – and he got a lot of sympathetic looks out of it. Often he had fantasized about catching one of the other girls and revealing his identity. What he wanted would surely follow, as it was only his right as a prince and a man. It took all his reserves of moral courage and sense of duty to stop him from doing so, especially in the tortuous, heavenly nights, when they all lay packed together on the mats that stretched from end to end of the servants' quarters. He acquired quite a reputation for being the only maid who was never afraid to get up and go to the bathroom alone in the dead of night.

"Oh Kiki, are you quite done?"

Deidameia waved and smiled as she entered her bedroom, attended by her air of supreme confidence, exotic perfume and the floating array of silk scarves she always wore on outdoor excursions to protect her flawless complexion from the Hellenic sun.

Jealous women were wont to attribute the princess' beauty to fine feathers. "Silks and diamonds," the scullery maid was apt to sniff. "If Kiki here had 'em she'd look fine as any princess of the realm, believe you me."

But Achilles, who was always called Kiki inspite of the fact that his given name on the stipend roll was Pyrrha, was never quite inclined to believe it. It was true that Deidameia was always dressed within an inch of her life, even when she went to bed – her nightgowns had rubies sewn into their bodices. But they were all accoutrements; accessories to her pale, pure skin, her mass of soft, springy, rosemary-scented hair, the wit and humour sparkling in her dark eyes. His voice shook a little as he turned and answered, bowing low.

"Quite finished, beauty of beauties," he said, picking up the basket, not daring to incline his gaze any further upwards than the hem of her cream satin gown.

"Darling," she said, flinging the scarves and string after string of pearls at him, "do me a favour and leave out something for me to wear this evening. I'm so tired I can't keep my eyes open. Have to be at dinner with Father tonight."

"But –" he began helplessly, and realised it was futile. He was standing at the foot of her bed holding bundles of her clothes, and she, her shoes kicked off, had already wriggled out of her suit and into sleep.

He put down the basket, wrapped the pearls around his wrists, and crept to her closet. Oh, he knew it would have been sensible to go and call Ara or Pepper and ask them to do the lady's bidding. How well he knew it, Achilles with his dark, plain gowns and fake menstrual cycle! But yearning overcame, aye, and desire won; a little choking wave rose in his throat and would not be calmed until he thrust his hand in the midst of this dark, fabulous space, scented faintly with jasmine and orange blossom, where silks and chiffons whispered to velvets and crepes and _cotton_, oh, such cotton as made Achilles groan and rub himself a little against the cool wood – cotton from the fields of mystic, feminine Egypt across the Mediterranean.

Should the princess wear the rose satin, with pink pearls lining the collar? The purple velvet, perhaps, with a rope of aquamarine jewels in her glossy braid. Achilles had a vision of Deidameia walking towards him in that shocking, becoming purple, peeling it off her body as she came – and his hands reaching up to undo the jewels from her braid, letting it slide through the unravelling hair, trailing delicately down her naked spine – and he would place his mouth on the small of her back and trace the path back upward – and her hair would form a gorgeous curtain about them –

He bit his lip. No, no. Best think of her in the full-sleeved white gown. Even if the sleeves were all fine, handcrafted lace, and you could catch the shadow of a glimpse of her breast when she raised her hands to adjust the little veil over her eyes. Such a jaunty little veil, almost a netted cap, but it was the suggestion of mystery that did it, the possibility of womanly enigma, and oh, Achilles was going to _lose it_ if he didn't breathe now and think of – of sword practice, and Chiron's punishments, and taking a cold, cold dip in the sea. Very cold.

With Patroklos.

He bit his lip _so hard_ it bled.

Later in the day, the girls noticed Kiki wearing a fresh gown, but didn't ask him about it. The most graceful of them tended to stain on first days.

* * *

He shouldn't have done it. But he was Achilles. It was neither in his nature nor his destiny to have headed straight back to his sleeping mat after his ritual midnight excursion to the loo. In fact, he hadn't even reached the loo when fate led his feet away from the washrooms, towards and into to Deidameia's dark, silent quarters. He padded across the threshold, thankful for the dark to hide his burning, flushed face. The room was closed, heavy with her scent, the jasmine hanging in the air like incense in a temple sanctum. His head spun with the _nearness_ of it, and her. Weakly he breathed and leaned on the arm of a chair to catch his balance.

And touched a piece of silken, slightly damp underwear.

His eyes, closed of their own volition, opened in a flash. But he had not – and she had not –

"Wear it, won't you, Kiki."

He spun around in the direction of the big four-poster even before she had said his name, shame mingling with arousal and a tinge of what was not fear, what could never be fear because fear did not exist in Achilles, but it was something that made his heart pound and his senses diamond-sharp. Of course she was there, a figure darker than darkness, the intense, overpowering heart of the night.

He cleared his throat. "Lady."

"_Wear it._"

It was impossible to disobey her, because she was his mistress; because she was wise and powerful and two years older, besides, and she was as beautiful as the stars.

And he did want to obey her, somewhat.

Slowly, he raised his bare feet, one after the other, and pulled the thing - _such_ a thing – over, sliding it up his legs. It felt like they'd grown longer and oh, the silk felt good against his skin. Good after days of coarse wool and linens and being a bloody boy and wasn't it a little tight? Just a little. Just right.

There was a spark and a flare; she lit the candles swimming in the lotus jar. She had worn the purple, after all, with a gold girdle and a gold comb loose in her hair. Little curls had escaped, hanging about her face. She looked very dishevelled, very flushed, and very beautiful.

"Kiki dear," she said, looking into his eyes. "You are such a bad girl."

"What have I done?" he asked, alarmed. She raised an eyebrow.

"Oh," he said, understanding. _Bad_, girl.

"And yet, you are one. You have to be." She shifted and leaned back against her cushions. "I saw you, you know, when you were laying out my clothes."

He bit his cheek and almost looked away.

"I have pretty things, don't I?" She smiled a little. "Very pretty. You, for one. Extremely pretty."

"Thank you, ma'am," he said demurely. "I try my best."

"Ah, but Kiki-kins," she replied, equally demure, "your best, I'm afraid, must needs be better."

His Adam's apple bobbed nervously.

"I hate sharing some things," the princess continued. "Books, for one. Clothes, sometimes."

"I do understand," he told her.

"Secrets, on the other hand." She raised a hand to her hair and took out the comb. "I like secrets."

He watched intently the way her hair coiled downwards and unwound, spilled across the cushions, ate up the candlelight.

"Want to share?" she asked softly.

He nodded slowly, struck dumb.

"Wonderful," she smiled. "Now drop that skirt."

He did drop it. It felt almost as wonderful as the silk panties.

She pulled him onto the bed and pushed him back against the cool sheets. 'My, my, Miss Kiki," she whispered, laughing, "what character your chest has."

Kiki flushed as she bent her head to kiss his character-filled chest and stroke the little rosy points on them – oh gods, and he had thought them _useless_, oh gods – and whimpered.

"I'm going to take you," she said in a low, rough voice.

He gasped and shuddered and squeaked, "It's not - time of month -"

But she growled and sucked his chin and all he could think of was her, and - "How do you do that?" he wailed.

And Deidameia showed him how to do it and to be it, as she strung her gold about his neck and wrapped him in her silk scarf. He could feel her curves just by looking at them, when she stripped her dress off her body. He shut his eyes as she teased him with it until he could not tell which was velvet and which her skin, and he almost wept for the beauty of it all.

She took his hands in hers and moulded his body beneath them, making him shiver and groan and cry out as she touched him in places he had never known could feel so good, and he scored her back with his nails as she moved above him, engulfing and trapping him, clutching the sheets and saying the most delightful things about belowstairs and underneath and his bottom and she – didn't – just – she did, and they did, and words slipped away from Achilles' power.

"Mia," he sobbed as he crumpled into himself. "Mia darling."

"Oh, Kiki," she murmured, holding him close, gentling him. "My Kiki baby."

 

* * *

This is the true story of how Achilles lost his virginity, although in later years he and, it must be confessed, the noble Patroklos, never did admit to it. It wasn't real, after all, unless there was a man involved. Deidameia and Kiki continued their lessons on how to be properly feminine well into the next few months, until an unfortunate mistake that Mia – he always called her Mia in private – refused to take the blame for, was committed. It is true that little Neoptolemos was born in strict legitimacy, but nearly as true, too, that the spirit of the circumstances was dubious in more than one way.

His father was apt to keep his distance from him in the years to come, but it must be mentioned that Neo greatly enjoyed the occasional visit from his Aunt Pyrrha, so long as she and his mother did not get into a nagging quarrel, which, alas, they did more often than not.

**Author's Note:**

> Great thanks to **maelipstick** for her beta and handholding.


End file.
